Legislation sent to President Obama this week quietly removed language in a bill that would have — for the first time — forced law enforcement to obtain a warrant to read Americans' email. Currently, private email that has been stored by a third party for more than 180 days can be accessed by the government without a warrant.

The bill was praised by Netflix as a modernization of the law "giving consumers more freedom." It passed the Senate on a voice vote, but without the language that would have forced law enforcement to obtain warrants rather than simply subpoenas to snoop into private emails.The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) blasted the removal.

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Leahy tried to amend this old law from 1986!!!!!!!

We didnt even know what the internet was then.

He tried to update this, get rid of 180 day rule, add location privacy...

Legislation sent to President Obama this week quietly removed language in a bill that would have — for the first time — forced law enforcement to obtain a warrant to read Americans' email. Currently, private email that has been stored by a third party for more than 180 days can be accessed by the government without a warrant.

The bill was praised by Netflix as a modernization of the law "giving consumers more freedom." It passed the Senate on a voice vote, but without the language that would have forced law enforcement to obtain warrants rather than simply subpoenas to snoop into private emails.The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) blasted the removal.

The government does not have to get a warrant, for instance, to read e-mail you have stored for over 180 days. That is a huge loophole, since many people use their e-mail accounts as electronic filing cabinets. The federal government has also taken the position that once you open an e-mail it loses its protection, and it does not need a warrant to read it.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act was enacted in 1986 — ancient history for the Internet. Senator Leahy has rightly been pushing to update it, and in particular to add new privacy protections.

Leahy's bill would eliminate the 180-day rule and impose a single standard: the government must get a search warrant from a court any time it wants to read your e-mail, old or new.In addition to the e-mail protections, Leahy's proposal takes on another cutting-edge issue: locational privacy. It would require the government to get a warrant in most cases when it wants to use the signals sent out by your smart phone or tablet computer to find out where you are.

The Leahy bill could go further. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leading privacy-rights group, objects that it would give the government greater ability to use National Security Letters to get data about whom people communicate with online, without a subpoena. But on the whole, it would make important improvements in the state of the law.

E-mail is today's equivalent of what postal letters and telephone calls once were. But the law has failed to give people the same protections in their e-mail that they have in those earlier methods of communication. If the Leahy bill becomes law it would help the law keep up with the march of technology — and it would start to put privacy protections where they need to be in the Internet Age.

If you left a letter on your desk for 180 days, you wouldn’t imagine that the police could then swoop in and read it without your permission, or a judge’s. But that’s just what law enforcement officers can do with your email. Using only a subpoena , government agents can demand that service providers turn over electronic communications they have stored, as long as those communications are more than six months old. Protections are even weaker for opened e-mail or documents stored in the “cloud.” The advertisements that the Postal Service piles into your mailbox every day are legally sacrosanct; the medical notifications your health-insurance company sends to your Gmail account are not.

This bizarre reality is thanks to the 1986 Electronic Privacy Communications Act, a law written before anyone dreamed that Americans would send, receive and store so much private information over third-party services such as Gmail or would draft documents using cloud computing that they intend to keep confidential. Now Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the 1986 law’s original author, wants to amend it into the 21st century.

Leahy is pressing his committee to adopt a series of changes that would establish the confidentiality of email and other electronic communications. Service providers would be prohibited from handing over email, and Leahy would get rid of the strange 180-day rule that the government can now use to compel disclosure. To access any email content, law enforcement officers would be required to obtain a search warrant from a judge after demonstrating probable cause. The amendments would also oblige officials to give those whose email they are reading a copy of the search warrant. This would bring the law in line with the reality that Americans are using electronic communications services to exchange and store all sorts of sensitive data. Many journalists rely on the cloud to transmit and store their work; the Newspaper Association of America, to which The Post belongs, is part of the Digital Due Process Coalition, which is lobbying for Leahy’s amendments.